As the first poem, “The Seminal Union of Carvers,” opens up, we can see a kind of convulsion in which violence saturates and moves towards and away from the speaker’s body. He begins, “I’ve saved the best conspiracy theories for my own private genocide,” attests, “I was born to break and break again,” but when violence’s mark becomes legible, “I’ve examined the bruise on your thigh and it looks nothing like your pet.” This instability keeps the poem out of the safe gesture of critique. The speaker is saturated with violence and becomes a medium for violence. He makes media, stories, sounds of violence. “In my great debacle, all stories are starting to sound like Vietnam.” “logging accidents pale in comparison to/the things that take place in my capital when everybody’s looking. “In my capital”, in my basement, in my torso, in my ribcage, in my girlfriend’s cunt, in the Hispanic children, the sites of violence are interchangeable like the quarantine that will take my place. “[The military] think the truth is buried somewhere in the backyard of my body. They think one shovel will do.”

Friday, October 08, 2010

New Review of With Deer

There's a review of Aase Berg's With Deer in Word/for Word by Nicole Zdeb:

"Berg doesn’t want to spare the reader any discomfort. This isn’t a poetry of the intermediary, the mystic, or suburbia. It has teeth. The teeth have been filed sharp. In some poems, each line is a sweep of a blade. The line has movement and bright music, but it isn’t singing to you. It is eviscerating."